


antimacassar

by Poose



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Anal Sex, Bruises, Death and Dying, Desperation, Dirtbag Solomon Tozer, Disease, M/M, Military Ranks, Shame Edward Little Power Hour, Suicidal Thoughts, The End of Vanity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:33:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24485917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poose/pseuds/Poose
Summary: Lieutenant Little and the mortifying ordeal of being known. On the tundra. Through butt stuff.
Relationships: Lt Edward Little/Sgt Solomon Tozer
Comments: 7
Kudos: 37





	antimacassar

**Author's Note:**

> "A bloody war or a sickly season."  
> ― Royal Navy toast for Thursday
> 
> “In everything that you do, pause and ask yourself if death is a dreadful thing because it deprives you of this.”  
> ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

It’ll bruise. 

Ten new fingerprints bleeding into the old ones, hurt layered upon hurt. 

It will bruise and Edward cares not one sodding lick. Let it. 

Burn, sting, hurt some more. 

Let it. Why be timid? Death is coming. 

Edward has seen the men, those who still have strength to care about such niceties, at their toilets. Fraying sleeves of jumpers pushed up, the grimy fabric binding their hands unwound and laid with great ceremony over makeshift clotheslines and wooden casks, flapping in the wind like streamers at a child’s birthday party. Undone braces framing backsides grown gaunt with hunger and toil as they scrub their faces and necks with rough bits of linen almost as filthy as they are. 

The men’s bruises bloom on the backs of hands and shins though they do their best to keep tidy in this befouled, befouling place. The lemon juice is long gone, if it had been any tonic worth the designation. Edward averts his eyes from the sight, thanks the Graces he suffers little by comparison. 

Yet a knock against his sea-chest will imprint a shadow right across the crease of his thighs, sure as the truth that he will fall asleep in a cloud of midges and blackfly, sure as he will wake to suffocating dust clogging his nose. That thin band of shadow marches to meet the ten dark marks that are there — he knows without looking exactly where they are located, right in the meat of his backside. 

The marks circumscribe him. Sergeant Tozer is dutiful and thus they never have time to fade entirely, Edward is certain. He does not touch them. He does not look. He knows full well what these marks signify. 

Others, many others, have cast aside the trappings of civilisation once and for all. Edward wonders if he should join them. Every morning he dons his uniform unfailingly, a solemn blue mended time and again, but recognisable as that which befits an officer. Edward’s mind stutters to imagine who he would be should he swap trousers for slops, cast aside his jacket and waistcoat and go forth in only the jumper Lizzy had knitted him for this expedition, tutting indulgently when he told her he preferred blue, grey, or at a pinch, black, to the green yarn she had favoured. 

Atop his camp bed lies his coat. In the privacy of his own tent, he removes it, shakes it out through the flap while he himself stays concealed. He pulls the empty salt pork cask that serves as table to, and writes. When night falls he takes up his log-book. Each hateful bright day has only his words to sever one from the next. 

Out here rank has been stripped from them by necessity, sure as the Captain has forsook his blues, and Mr. Des Voeux gone piratical, and Dundy outright naked in his once-white jumper, a pale echo of Commander Fitzjames, now lost. Even Sergeant Tozer can no longer be recognized across camp by his red coat. Edward’s eyes search for him when he is on patrol, his own slung rifle a comforting weight against his back, and he will see him, legs stretched out as he sits beside a meagre fire and stares at the smoky flame. 

When it comes time for sleep he removes his jacket and his waistcoat, and when he cleans himself with the linen he does so underneath his clothing. Only in the last few months has he touched, been touched, by anyone. A clap on the shoulder, maybe, a tap against his lapels. He finds himself reaching after people as they pass, hoping to slow their passing if only momentarily. Perhaps it is also a sickness, this relentless desire for touch, same as that which steals them from one another, weakens their lungs, halts their hearts. 

When he walks past the clump of men at their leisure Sergeant Tozer acknowledges his presence with the barest minimum of respect owed an officer, a mere tilt of his bearded chin, and Edward’s hands ball up at his sides to recognize the insolence. 

He knows himself to be a gentleman, Mr. Little. An officer, too, called Lieutenant Little. A son, a brother, a friend to those who knew and loved him. 

But the way Sergeant Tozer looks at him, direct, like he sees past Mr. Little, Lieutenant Little, Edward, Ned. It renders him nameless. Nameless and _free_. It puts a bounce in his measured pace that has no place in this camp, this waystation on the sure march towards death. 

When Sergeant Tozer had first invited himself into Edward’s tent, lit himself a cigarette and laid his feet, in their boots, right across the grimy bedclothes, he had decided then and there that his implicit offer was as promising as any which might subsequently ensue. Why be timid? Here, now? In this place? 

The rum was all drunk and the lash had been quitted months before Mr. Johnson had, and what did that leave but sleep, indolence, and buggery? What else was there to do? They have offloaded the books, save their Bibles, and no more music is played, no more songs are sung. It is trouble to round up a full four for a hand of cards, and in consequence that has stopped too. 

_S’good, lass_ he’d said with a quiet rumble. _Open to me like the furrow to the plow, eh?_

Edward had thought right at that moment that he could scream. He could, should have screamed. What relief it would have been. To be found and found out, as a sodomite, tried by a court martial of men he considers friends, and be hung at dawn. An easy thing, a capital death. It would only have taken the courage to cry out. Much easier than walking off, as Mr. Bridgens had done, after Henry Peglar's passing, to simply lie down to never wake again. 

Cowardice stemmed his hand. It choked him. 

Edward had wished only to make his father proud, his mother happy. To be given a command rife with honour but strongly lacking in chances to gain glory. Let him patrol the shipping lanes in the Mediterranean, provide escort to merchant skippers. Let him sail leisurely and buoyant down the coastline with its deep natural harbours and port cities in which to procure Spanish wine and fresh sheet music for his crew. 

Sergeant Tozer cannot know his thoughts; they meet one another in Edward's tent, it is true, often enough to make clear their purpose to any who might wish to discern it. It would seem the time for questions, disciplinary infractions, has passed. A loud cry will not end in a noose round his neck, the way it had for Mr. Hickey, Mr. Armitage, Mr. Gibson. He is no mutineer but still. Edward stifles them. 

Edward had reached then, that first encounter, for the striped pillow, shiny with grease, and curled its hem beneath his fingers. He had desired only to be touched by another living soul, and goddamn the price. Liking, no, _loving_ it. That had came as a bit of a surprise. 

The Sergeant had placed his rough hands over top of Edward’s own and shifted hard behind him until pain speckled his vision and he cried out with it at last. 

_There it is, Lieutenant._ He carded sure fingers through Edward’s filthy hair and then, as a question to which he expected no reply said _Feeling that, are you, Edward?_

He could have wept from gratitude. 

Sergeant Tozer steals the bottle of oil from his camp-table on which sits his log-book open to today. Thursday.

Edward’s three youngest sisters had pooled their money to buy it for him and he used it but sparingly, on occasions due a sense of ceremony, on his sidewhiskers and in his hair. During Twelvetide, from Christmas Eve straight through to Epiphany, and on solemn, sad occasions. When he heard that Graham was dead and gone. The afternoon they mourned Sir John and the Marines honoured him with a salute. Dark days on Terror, when his face itched, frozen from cold. He had warmed a precious drop between his fingers and leant down to breathe in the odour. It reminded him of walking past a Papist church with the door open, smoke from within gliding over meadows wet with dew. 

He murmurs a passing insult as he takes down Edward's braces, balls up the green jumper in his fist, right in the middle of his back, and pushes him down against the sea-chest. His own hands fumble at the placket of his trousers, but Sergeant Tozer has dexterity enough, still, to open them and shove them carelessly down his thighs. He hits the surface with his temple, entirely by accident, and grimaces with the pain. It will bruise there, then, too, and unless he ceases looking in the glass entirely Edward will be forced to reckon with it. 

Today had been Thursday. Yesterday a Wednesday. Tomorrow a Friday. They lose each day a fraction of a mile as they haul, and Edward writes down the tally, how many days, how many fractions of days, that pushes them further out the other side. His log-book is all scribbles, mathematics that were once easy grown more punishing as sense fails him. They have nothing but time out here in the waste, but even that will run out soon. 

He uncorks the bottle with his teeth, pours it straight down his drawers and onto Edward — fuck, into — Edward. The first time, the second, he wasted nary a drop, the same way Edward had done when he patted it in sparingly. A precious thing to be savoured like oysters at Christmas, the first autumn brace of pheasant. 

But now. Well. 

Today is a Thursday, and in seven days, one week, one quarter of a month, half a fortnight, a sennight by the old reckoning, it will be again, Thursday. 

Eight miles. Eight miles on a good day. Their last good day, Edward thinks, was a Thursday, no, a Tuesday. Two weeks ago? 

Their skin is parched wrinkled, dry. 

For three years he has been frozen solid in these clothes, layers of good Scottish wool knit and felted, and now here out on the frozen waste he is suddenly burning up with heat. 

His breath streams warm against the wood. It smells of campfire, outside, but is otherwise silent. 

What remains? 

His tent reeks with it. Attar of rose, coconut palm, sweet woods, an exotic flower whose provenance he cannot quite identify. For three years it has been the scent of special occasions. Now it only tells him that they hasten death with every day that passes. 

It hurts a bit, now. He grapples against the wood that steadies him. A cry bubbles out. Edward curses himself for it, despite the oil leaking down the inside of his thigh and down into his drawers. Despite the pain. 

_We'll not have you waking the ladies, Lieutenant._ With his mouth close to Edward’s ear Sergeant Tozer says _bite down on that if you like._

Edward’s vision blurs as he moves his head to see a hand, now coming into focus yet so smeared with dirt it is hard to differentiate from the wood. 

_G’on_ he says, like he's soothing a horse _can't tell us you're too good for it now._

Gingerly, with reluctance, Edward touches his teeth to the skin stretched taut between Sergeant Tozer’s thumb and first finger, winces. Dirt, ever dirt, gunsmoke, powder, tobacco, ash. The inside of his mouth is gummy but grows wet from the intrusion. A taste blooms beneath the filth. Salt — the sea, the sea — sweat, and piss, and tears. His own? 

Edward runs his tongue along the cracked skin there, clamps down hard to stifle the whimper. 

The oil seeps down his backside, thinned now where their joined heat has made it so. The dry air is lush with smells from a storybook. Gardens spilling out from behind walls, and the whole world vivid, and green, and alive. A place where he might strip down to his shirt and plunge into a cold pool on a hot summer’s day. England. _Home._

In another place, though. If they were not starved, sick, here on this wasteland, then this would never have come to be. On Terror, with Hodgson’s musical ear so close at hand, and poor dead Jopson, so dearly missed, vigilant about the invisible line of demarcation? How would that have worked, really? On some ships the ranking Marines might dine with the officers, and though Edward would have appreciated the sight of Sergeant Tozer with his beard trimmed neat and his strong hands scrubbed clean, that would not have opened the door to possibility. 

To go home, too, to make it back home. Edward’s mind reels certain that the slim margin of possibility has closed, yet they trudge south all the same. Perhaps they will meet a hunting party, stumble upon a settlement. A foot party, their own people, sent to search for them. It could, he dares to imagine with a little flutter of hope, still happen. 

What would they be to one another then? On the other side of this hell? 

Would he, what, call on Edward? At his family home? Meet him at a tavern for an ale and a round of catch-up, Edward shining like a Christmas ornament in his braid and epaulettes, new medals for bravery, honour, steadfast service pinned to his chest. 

Sergeant Tozer might make Major; might gather a few medals to wear himself, but that would not be enough to render them equal. Edward will always be an officer, always have been an officer, a commissioned man, and he served Her Majesty same as the Marines, but that would hardly rate. 

From this place to home. England might as well be Jakarta, the Himalaya, the Moon. 

Sergeant Tozer detaches his hand from Edward’s teeth, pulls back the corner of his mouth with two fingers hard enough to yank his sagging head up. Drool streams down his chin. He cups the side of Edward's face for a moment too brief to lean into, passes a hand through his hair but soon takes that away too. He grabs the muscle between Edward's neck and shoulder, always tight and sore, and compresses his fingers either side, bringing front and back that much closer together. 

_Don’t stop_ Edward hears himself say as he lets go his shoulder _right please don’t don’t please_ even as he unsheathes himself with a chuckle. Edward feels the loss so acutely he keens, whines wetly against the wooden chest. His fingers scrabble for purchase as he struggles to right himself. 

_You know the law as well as I_ he says. He slaps Edward on the backside, away from the old marks, shakes him in his cupped hand with a pleased grunt. 

_What will you do_ Edward stretches his neck to look behind him, his arms now wrapped around his sea-chest as if embracing a lover. His cock twitches fitful against the wood. _When we leave here?_

Sergeant Tozer grins. He is the sort of man who can tell you a lie, and how Edward longs for a beautiful lie with which to seek his end. 

_We make it out of here_ he says, groping around for the oil bottle and, finding it out of reach and Edward perilously needy, spits on him instead. What relief to be breached again. His thumb, Edward thinks, from how the joint bends, the way the remaining fingers lie against his lower back. It settles the ache enough for him to sigh out his pleasure. 

_Same as this_ he says, and twists his hand, deliberate and strong. _I’ll bring you to a room where's to have you over any stick of wood to hand._

Edward’s ears buzz with blood. He is hard, sweaty, hot in too much clothing, too much skin. 

He is weightless, clean for the first time in a hundred thousand hours, a million days.

_First thing I’ll do, Sir, is spend inside, and you can keep that promise in your pocket._

He bangs his hand on the chest and the other man covers it at once; he pitches back as if a fit has come over him, a spasm he had not anticipated and cannot control. Sergeant Tozer catches him around the throat with the lower half of his arm, pulls his thumb out in order to fondle Edward’s prick, and perhaps this is finally the moment when he will find a way to crush Edward's windpipe and deliver him from this hell; that he will dissolve into an absence like the nothing which surrounds them, that he will cease to have to be Mr. Little, Lieutenant Little, Edward, Ned. 

Edward gropes for an edge to hold onto, strains his neck away from Sergeant Tozer's teeth set into the the meat of his shoulder. 

Sound carries less than on the ice, but the men who yet live have able ears, despite this devil. 

Moments — minutes — later he comes to, head pillowed on his forearms. His thighs are warm, dripping. A huge shuddery sound forces its way from his lungs. Behind him Sergeant Tozer laughs, a dark chuckle that has Edward wiping at his damp eyes. He must have reached his spending, for his prick lolls heavy and softening between his thighs, and when he reaches for it, cautious but clumsy, it leaves his palm wet. 

Sounds of a match being struck against the cask, a sharp pleased rumble as he pulls smoke into his lungs. Edward tried the vice for a time, with a carved pipe, a gift from his father once he'd made 3rd Lieutenant. He had one, even now, tucked up with his most precious things inside the trunk. Graham liked a smoke, of an evening, and Edward had wished fervently to join him in this ritual yet all it did was make him cough. His tobacco sits unused, though whether it is any good by now, Edward could not rightly tell you. He should open up the chest, rummage for it. Make a gift of it to Sergeant Tozer, he who comes bearing this dark intimacy, enough to allow him to go on, for a little while, at least. 

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted this pairing but with hot depression beards. Sorry people had to die in service of that.


End file.
